


In Her Argent Embrace

by taiyakisoba



Category: Original Work
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Blushing, Chivalry, Courtly Love, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Gentle femdom, Holding Hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-18
Packaged: 2018-02-25 03:12:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2606318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taiyakisoba/pseuds/taiyakisoba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a knight errant becomes your traveling companion after saving you from certain death at the hands of bandits, you might have expected the rest of your journey to pass uneventfully. However, trouble seems to follow the imposing but gentle-hearted lady Leuna wherever she goes, and there's the added complication that she knows more about the knightly protocols than about life and romance, although she does seem eager to learn...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [/r9k/](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=%2Fr9k%2F).



> Sorry for the long wait! This time the story's a bit heavy on plot, but hopefully there's enough [gentleness intensifies] to satisfy fans of gentle femdom. Enjoy!

When you finally come to, your head is pounding. Around you, trees are hanging from the sky like stalagmites, and a small group of men is walking among them, upside down.

You’re hanging by your legs from a tree, strung up like a hunk of meat.

Then you remember. You were riding your horse through the forest of Isil on the way to the capital when you were set upon by bandits. No wait, not bandits: the insignia on their worn-out leather armour showed them to be the remnants of Duke Gutizia’s army of irregulars, probably eking out a living by waylaying travellers on the road. You wish now that you’d heeded the innkeeper’s warning about taking a short-cut through the forest. 

“Hey! Get me down from here!”

As soon as the words leave your mouth, you realise how ridiculous you sound. But in your current predicament, there’s little else you can do.

One of the upside-down men, a thin, pale man with stringy black hair, looks up from rifling through the saddlebags newly-stripped from your horse. “Sounds like he’s had enough of hanging by the legs, boys!”

Another of the men, a tall man with dirty sandy-blonde hair, chuckles. You guess he’s the boss by the way he’s lounging up against a tree and chewing on a wad of tobacco while he watches the thin man work. “Think he might prefer to hang by the neck instead?”

Someone shoves you from behind and you yelp as you’re sent swinging about, your surroundings spinning past your eyes: your meagre possessions laid out across the grass and the thin man pawing over them; the sandy-haired boss laughing fit to burst; the trunk of the tree you’re hanging from; the grimacing, mirthful face of the man who pushed you, stout and fat like a butcher’s son; your horse, tied to another tree.

Your horse. If you can just someone slip your feet from their bonds...

The stout man leaps up and grabs your dangling arms, righting you and slowing your swing. 

“Now then, lad,” he says, “Where’s the rest of your stuff?”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s nothing here. Just some rations and water and sundry coins. There’s no way that’s all you have. Where are your crowns?”

There’s nothing else, you say, telling the truth. You tell him that you’re on your way to Hiria to take up a new job and that that you spent the last of your crowns on the horse.

“That so?” The boss laughs from against the tree. “No, your face tells me you’re an Easterner, from Elkiad most likely. The son of one of those rich banking families.” His laughter stops suddenly. “You’re lying to us.”

You protest, telling him that not everyone from the East is a banker, and even then not every banker is rich. They’re barely listening at this point.

The red-faced man looks over to the boss, who nods, then walks across to where the thin man is still sorting through your baggage and picks up your dagger. He returns to you, leering.

With the dagger at your neck he takes your ear in his other greasy hand.

“So tell me, lad, where should we start? Nose, ear? There’s a lot to choose from. Better start talking before all you’ve got left to your name is your tongue.”

There’s a hissing sound and the black flash of what can only be a crossbow bolt. The red-faced man jerks away from you as if he’s been struck by lightning, the knife spinning from his hand. He collapses to the ground, but not before grabbing at you in an attempt to stay on his feet and sending you swinging again.

The boss and the pale, lank man’s eyes are drawn to something out of your field of vision - but you can hear what’s startled them.

Hooves. The rapid hoof-fall of a galloping horse.

You’re still twisting in the breeze and on the end of one revolution when you catch sight of the white horse and its rider, their plate armour flashing brilliant in the sunshine filtering into the grove, a sky-blue cloak fluttering around their shoulders. 

A knight? In the Forest of Isil?

They’re almost on top of you now and for a moment you wonder if they’re going to ride right through you and finish the bandits’ job for them. The red-faced man, clutching his wounded hand, has already broken into a run, his bulk crashing through the undergrowth at the edge of the clearing. The boss has drawn his own weapon, a long sword, and is sprinting for the cover of a tree, but the knight is on him before he reaches it. You see a flash of brightly polished steel as the knight strikes him across the side of his body, but only with the flat of the blade, the strength of the blow lifting him from his feet and sending him sprawling backwards.

The knight reins his horse in and walks it over to you. The visor of the silver helmet regards you with its hidden eyes.

“Are you injured?”

It’s a surprisingly youthful voice that echoes from within that visored helmet, so young as to almost sound like a woman’s voice. You give a strangled reply, but it becomes a shout of warning when you notice the lank, pale man leap onto your horse and cut it loose with a thin blade.

He turns and spurs the traitorous animal with kicks and shouts and it smashes its way out of the grove through the undergrowth in the direction of the road. 

It only takes a moment for the knight to react, and then he’s spurring his own horse and plunging on after him. 

Their hoof-falls fade and silence reigns over the grove. You hang there, feeling the blood slowly flow to your head. 

What feels like an eternity later the knight returns. He brings his horse alongside you and grabs hold of the rope in one gauntleted hand. He says something to you, but all you can hear is the roaring in your head from the blood pooling there.

You’re about to black out when you see the knight swing their sword, sheering through the rope just above your feet. 

Then you’re on the ground, your head and feet flooding with agony as blood flows back the direction that nature intended. The knight leaps down from their horse and after slipping off their gauntlets cuts the rope around your ankles. He takes your hands and pulls you onto your feet with surprising strength.

The hands in your own are tan, honey-brown, slender and surprisingly soft. The nails are neat and even, as if they’ve been manicured. They’re just like a woman’s hands.

You’re still staring at them when the knight gently removes his hands from yours and begins to unstrap his helmet.

“My horse,” you mutter, still dazed.

“He got away.” the knight answers. “I’m sorry.” It’s devastating news, but you barely hear it. For far more arresting is the knight’s voice, distinct now that the helmet is off: low and feminine, it’s unmistakeably a woman’s.

You look up into blue-upon-blue eyes. 

It _is_ a woman. And she’s beautiful.

Her skin, like her hands, is a gorgeous tanned caramel-brown. Her nose is small, her eyes large and an intensely deep blue. Free of her helmet, her hair is short and pale blonde, the colour of white gold. There’s a dusting of freckles across her nose and beneath her eyes. She seems a few years older than you, but you’re not sure just how much.

She's also very tall, so tall she's actually quite imposing.

Her cheeks take on a suddenly rosy hue and she drops her gaze. 

Wait. Is she _blushing_?

You realise it’s because you’ve been staring at her for a while now. You turn away, embarrassed, muttering an apology and thanking her for saving your life. 

Dull moaning comes from the edge of the grove and you suddenly recall that the third of your assailants, the boss, is still there. The knight turns and watches him as he tries to get to his feet. The blush is gone, her eyes impossibly cold and steely, her lips a thin line. She strides over and, grabbing him by the back collar of his jerkin, she lifts him, still groaning, up onto his feet.

It’s an unexpected display of strength, and you can’t help but enjoy seeing _one_ of your tormentors, at least, getting a taste of his own medicine.

The knight pulls back his head so that they’re face to face. “As you’re no doubt aware, the punishment for banditry under Regency Law is the noose,” she says.

The man is still dazed and he stares at her, barely comprehending. 

The blonde-haired knight shakes him. “Did you hear me?”

Shocked out of his daze he nods feverishly.

“Go tell your men that the next time I meet any of you, you’ll hang.” She sends him sprawling with a kick to the torso. Scrambling as best he can with what seem to be broken ribs, he half-runs, half-stumbles away into the forest. 

The knight wipes her hands on her surcoat and then looks in your direction. She quickly averts her eyes and undoes the silver clasp of her sky-blue cloak, which she holds out to you at arm’s length. 

“Here. Take this.”

Of course. You’re still in your underwear.

You take the cloak and wrap it around yourself. The knight turns back to find you covered and you see her visibly relax. There’s still the ghost of a blush on her face, though. On one who just routed brigands without breaking a sweat it’s as charming as it is unexpected.

She lifts her eyes from where she’s been looking at the crescent silver clasp in her hand. You jerk your eyes away, worried that she’ll catch you staring at her again and look around the grove. 

The guy who escaped on your horse knew what he was doing: there are barely any of your possessions left. He must have shovelled them into the saddlebags while everything was in chaos. You kick the few items of rubbish lying on the ground and curse your stupidity for taking a short-cut through the woods. Now you’ve lost even the little you had.

The knight looks at you with pity in her eyes. “My apologies. If only I’d been able to catch him...”

You stop your muttering and shake your head. You apologise for your griping and thank her again for saving your life. 

“I guess the gods were smiling on me,” you say to her. “No one usually comes this way. You must know this area well.”

A surprisingly shy smile appears on her face. “Actually, I’m lost. As you might have guessed, I’m not from around here.”

You nod. She’s clearly Elurran, the first you’ve ever met close-up. You’ve seen them at a distance before, traders in the streets of Elkiad, but even in that hub of commerce they’re a rare sight indeed, only occasionally coming to sell the fragrant amber for which desolate, snowy Elurra is famous.

She’s tall, her hair so blonde it's more silver than gold. It’s a colour you’ve seen women in Elkiad try and replicate with dyes, but it’s never come close to that spun-platinum look that true Elurrans have. The way she picked that bandit up one-handed, she must be well-built beneath all that armour, but it’s hard to tell; the slenderness of her hands seems to indicate toned sleekness rather than brawn, though. Her form is eminently feminine, now that you see her walking around: even clad in armour, the flare of her hips, the narrowness of her waist and the curve of her bust is obvious. 

Her cheeks have grown rosy once more and you realise that your staring is making her blush again. Ashamed, you pull your gaze away and mutter an apology. You’ve never met an Elurran before, you tell her. 

She nods, seemingly even more embarrassed by your embarrassment. Then she holds out her hand to you. “My name Is Leuna Zilarresko Ilargiaren.”

Zilarresko Ilargiaren? Only Mendians have names like that.

You’re not used to shaking hands - in Elkiad you bow - and you take hers in your own and shake it in the manner you suppose it’s done as you tell her your own name. Leuna appears amused by the way you shake her hand, and the awkwardness of the moment seems to lighten the mood. When you drop your hand you can’t help but bow low to her, in the Eastern manner, and thank her again for saving your life. 

“So what do you do when you’re not saving clueless merchant’s sons?” you ask her.

“I’m a knight errant,” she says. “On my way to Hiria to swear fealty to the Regent. That is, I _was_ until I got lost in this accursed forest.”

You tell her that Hiria is your destination as well. You’re there to take up a new job with the papers of introduction your master has given you.

“Then I must insist you ride with me,” says Leuna. “After all, it’s my fault that you find yourself in the unfortunate situation you’re in.”

You want to argue with her, but in truth you’re relieved with the offer. It’s a long way to Hiria on foot, and there are far worse things than bandits lurking the plains and forests. 

After she retrieves the crossbow she threw aside earlier, Leuna vaults up onto her horse and pulls you up behind her like you weigh nothing at all. She rides bareback in the Mendian manner, so you’re left to grasp the mane of her horse as she lets out the reins. A few clicks of her tongue and her horse breaks into an eager trot. You’re not used to riding this way and you quickly find yourself holding on for dear life. Leuna notices this and with a laugh reaches back and places first one and then your other hand around her waist. Anchored to her statuesque proportions you feel far steadier, even if your heart is racing even faster.

She smells very nice indeed, a mixture of clean linen, fresh perspiration and her own indefinable scent, a scent you recognise from the cloak wrapped around you.

“That’s better,” she says. “I’d never forgive myself if you fell off after everything else that’s befallen you today.”

You chuckle, a little bitterly. She’s not wrong. You lost your horse, your crowns, your possessions and even your clothes. But even though you’re little better than naked, your buttocks buffeted from below by the horse’s spine, you can’t help but feel somehow compensated for your earlier trials with your arms encircling the waist of your unexpected saviour and the delightful scent of her body in your nose.

As you ride through the forest, the silence starts to pall and so you thank Leuna again for getting involved in a fight that wasn’t hers.

She laughs, a bright sound. “Well, like every knight, I’ve sworn an oath to protect the weak.” 

You chuckle, a little ruefully. The weak, huh? Well, it’s hard to argue with that. You _were_ hanging upside down in your underwear when she first met you.

Leuna looks over her shoulder, baffled by your reaction, and then she blushes.

“Oh. I didn’t mean to imply that...”

You tell her it’s okay. She’s not the first person to ever call you that. Besides, you’re just a humble merchant’s son, and merchants are not known for their fighting prowess.

A slightly awkward silence falls back over the two of you. You’re exhausted after your ordeal, so you let the rocking of the horse’s trotting send you into a strange half-waking sleep.

\------

You jerk awake and there’s a moment of terror as you feel the world shifting up and down. You grab onto the nearest steady thing you can find and hang on.

There’s a feminine gasp and then you remember you’re on horseback, riding behind the Elurran knight called Leuna. You’ve didn’t think you squeezed her that hard, but...

You relax your grip and apologise profusely to the back that you’re squeezed up against.

There’s gentle laughter from Leuna. “It’s alright,” she says. “The trotting makes me sleepy too.”

You look about with bleary eyes. The forest is thinner now, and you estimate that you’re almost out of it. There are no longer those hanging profusions of vines and creepers and the trees that you pass by lack that primeval hugeness that surrounded you earlier. Light scatters down through gaps in the canopy off the road, while above you there’s a long band of blue sky.

You look up. The sky has that depth of blue that tells you that nightfall is not so very far away.

“We’ll have to start looking for a good campsite,” says Leuna, reading your mind.

You tell her that you should be reaching a tributary of the Bihurri soon, and that there’s a secret little spot a short way upstream that you know of that should be comfortable.

You reach the ford. The Bihurri in these autumnal months is quite low and sluggish: if you were here during spring, you’d find it impossible to cross given the swollen mass of waters from the melting snow of the mountains plunging down. As it is now, the river gurgles delightfully, its surface sparkling with the lazy fall sunlight as Leuna guides her horse carefully along its banks and across the numerous little pebbly beaches that spot its length. You soon see the outcropping of a ridge that tells you you’ve almost reached the spot you told her about. 

It’s a little cave, set under the ridge, well-sheltered from the wind that often blows in from across the plains. There’s a spring a little further along the river, with pure water bubbling up through layers of sand and rock, making it a perfect camping site. 

Leuna hops off her horse and encourages it with pats and clicks of her tongue as it struggles to keep its balance walking along a particularly uneven strip of the beach. She looks around at the tall beeches and the old willow that leans down, obscuring the cave, then turns to you and smiles.

“A lovely spot,” she murmurs. “I never would have found anything like this on my own.” She frowns. “I’ve been setting up camp in some pretty uncomfortable places.”

You say you’re not surprised. There’s very little civilised habitation between Elurra and the Forest of Isil, after all, mostly just windswept tundra. You assume that it’s the path she took, given that she’s an Elurran.

Leuna shakes her head. “Oh no, I haven’t come from Elurra. I’ve never been there, actually. I’m from Mendia.”

Mendia? Well, her name _did_ sound Mendian, but you’re still surprised. It’s a northern region of defiles and craggy ridges, an offshoot of the range that eventually becomes the Elurran mountains. A short and swarthy people live there, the dour and devout ex-refugees of religious conflict a hundred years ago. Their society is infamously strict, bound by the edicts of its council of elders. 

Leuna notes your confusion and sighs. “Everyone’s always surprised by that. But it’s a long story. Let’s set up camp first.”

While Leuna sets up the camp and starts unloading things from her horse, you duck away with her water skins to fill them at the spring since it’s a tricky spot to find if you don’t know where to look.

When you come back there’s already a little fire going. You come past her horse and chuckle when you see that Leuna has built a little bivouac for him: a tarpaulin over a tree branch. He looks content as he grazes on the sweet meadow grasses and flowers of the riverbank. 

He’s a fine animal, and there’s a wildness about his face that you don’t usually see on horses tamed by humans. He’s clearly an elfin animal. But Leuna said that she isn’t from Elurra...

She’s definitely mysterious, you decide. 

You hear sweeping from the cave and find her wielding a tree branch as an impromptu broom, sweeping the floor of dust and the remnants of campfires.

She stops and smiles at you. She’s taken off her armour and is wearing her under-tunic and gambison. Her cuirass and the rest of her plate is stacked neatly near the mouth of the cave.

You tried to imagine how she looked under her armour when you first met her, and you weren’t too far off your predictions, but it’s another thing to see just how statuesque she is. Somehow, stripped of her armour she seems even taller. It’s probably the length of her legs that does it, and her bare brown arms hint at just how toned they must be as well. Her hips are generously flared, her thighs broad but shapely. She’s quite busty as well. The cuirass hid the shape of her chest, but since her breasts must still be bound underneath, her already ample gambison hints at a voluptuousness that you hadn’t expected. 

Leuna catches you staring again. The smile becomes shy and her gaze drops down to the branch in her hands and she returns to her sweeping.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “My Academy upbringing. I like things being neat.”

You nod. What can you say? You’ve no doubt proven to her without a doubt that you’re an utterly mannerless idiot. Gawking at her like a slack-jawed hick staring at travelling acrobats. 

You say you’ve got the water and groan inwardly at the fact that only an idiot wouldn’t already know that, based on the still-dripping skins you’re carrying. You put them down next to the rest of her equipment and duck off to collect more firewood. It gets cold here on the edge of the plain and beside, you need an excuse to get away and cover your embarrassment. 

You realise how you must look to her. Having to be saved from bandits, half-naked, continually staring at her. You’re utterly mortified. 

After you regain your composure, you return to the camp with an armful of wood. You add it to the pile and sit down near the fire. It’s getting colder, and being near-naked under the cloak, you’re really starting to feel it.

Leuna notices you shivering. She gets up and starts to rifle through her belongings.

“What are you looking for?” you ask her.

“My needle and thread,” she says. “You need some proper clothes.”

\--------

Having had no time to hunt, it’s biscuit for dinner, and Leuna busies herself at her needlework as you eat. She’s cannibalised one of her own tunics and is altering it, her deft fingers graceful and unerring with the needle and thread.

Once it’s finished she hands it to you and you excuse yourself from the ring of the campfire to put it on. The needlework is finely done. You unwrap the cloak and slip the tunic on. It feels good to be dressed properly again and not threatened by sudden slippage. You roll up the cloak carefully.

The tunic smells just like the cloak did, infused as it is with the ghost of Leuna’s scent. It can’t just be your imagination. It’s a very pleasant scent indeed, and for some reason you find it very comforting.

When you return to the firelight you find Leuna holding the little crescent clasp you saw earlier and staring at it. Feeling like you’re interrupting something, you sheepishly hand the rolled up cloak to her, but she shakes her head.

“You’ll need it to keep warm,” she says. “I know how badly Easterners are affected by the cold.”

Well, she is from Mendia, after all. They’re most at home in the rocky defiles of their mountain homeland, and her Elurran blood would make her unsusceptible to the cold.

You sit down and take a drink of water. It’s pure and refreshing. You wish you had something a little stronger, though. You sigh, thinking about how you’d be at the Sulphur Road Inn right now, eating beef and drinking ale if it wasn’t for your streak of bad luck.

Leuna looks at you, her head cocked. “Still not warm enough? Should I put some more wood on the fire?”

You shake your head. No, you’re warm enough.

There’s a short silence as you both eat your biscuit. You apologise for taking the food from Leuna’s mouth. She just laughs and says, “If I was a better rider you wouldn’t have lost your rations.”

Dreading a return of the silence, you quickly ask her why she’s traveling to the capital to swear fealty to the Regent.

“I’m tired of the life of a knight errant,” she explains. “As a Knight of the Rose and vassal to the Regent I’ll be able to have my own squire and perhaps one day a fief!” She sighs. “One day.”

There’s an almost childlike excitement in her voice and it’s incredibly charming in such a self-assured individual. Self-assured _and_ mysterious.

Something must have shown on your face as Leuna starts to tell you more about herself. She speaks quickly, seemingly as scared of the silence as you are. 

She was found wandering the mountains as a small child by Mendian trappers, who brought her back to their little community. Efforts were made to locate her family amongst the Elurrans, but to no avail. The only clue they had to her identity was the clasp that she had with her when she was found.

“That crescent-moon clasp,” you murmur, suddenly understanding her obsession with it.

Leuna nods, her fingers tracing the edges of it. “No one seemed to know where I’d come from. No one among the Elurrans was missing a child. Or so they said.”

You ask her if she ever tried finding her family after she grew up. She nods, but the question seems to make her uncomfortable.

“I couldn’t find them,” she says, leaving it at that.

You don’t press her. 

Luckily, the Mendians display little of the racism many of the other peoples of the West feel towards the Elurrans, due to their religious beliefs, and she was taken in by one of the major families of the settlement. She grew up just like a normal Mendian, hunting, fishing and praying. 

“I always knew I was different, though. I mean, look at me.” She smiles awkwardly. “Black as a crow among Mendian swans. And then I grew tall and just kept on growing.”

When it came time for her to take up a trade, she tried her hand at everything, but it was only when an old ex-knight in the village saw her hunt and kill a leopard deep in the mountains that she was taken to the Academy in the Mendian capital of Gotorleku as an apprentice.

“It was a strict life,” she says. “But compared to my upbringing it actually tasted like freedom. I spent ten years there, and when I earned my sword I became a knight errant. But I have to admit, freedom has started to pall.” She sighs. “You start to miss the company of others, and hot water... and food especially.” She chews a hunk off the rations and chews it without pleasure.

It’s your turn to fill her in with your life story. It’s nowhere near as interesting, being a pretty pedestrian account of the life of a merchant’s son in peaceful, sunny, ocean-facing Elkiad, but she seems wrapt and asks you for explanations almost every step of the way. She seems especially amazed that men and women mingle freely in your little city-state.

“But doesn’t anything ever happen?” she asks.

You ask her what she means.

“You know. When a boy and... and a girl... I mean, if he likes her... and she likes him...”

You smile at her blushing discomfort and say that in the East people are free to follow their heart if they meet someone they like, though of course richer and more powerful families tend to have arranged marriages.

She nods in understanding. “Like our marriages.” 

That’s right. The Mendians have a tradition of betrothing their children while still very young.

“So, I guess you’re already betrothed, then,” you say.

The question seems to embarrass her. Leuna shakes her head.

“But I thought...”

You shut your stupid mouth. Of course there’d be a problem. Just because their religion requires that everyone be treated equally doesn’t automatically mean that anyone would want her as a wife or daughter-in-law. It’s easy to tolerate a fellow townsperson, after all, or act like you do, but to take someone into your family, someone who looks so different from everyone else...

You throw a piece of wood on the fire. Sparks flick up and spin around the swirl of grey-blue smoke. Feeling a total fool, you sit there, not sure if you should try to start the conversation up again or stay silent.

Leuna watches the sparks as they flicker and die mid-flight and after a while starts to talk again. “It’s not that I don’t want to get married,” she says. “It’s just...well.” She sighs. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. The life of a knight doesn’t really leave much time for that sort of thing, anyway.”

Because of all that righting wrongs and protecting the weak? you suggest.

Leuna laughs. “I’m sorry I called you weak.”

You let the subject die at this point. You’re feeling guilty for having brought the whole thing up, but there’s also a strange sense of relief that she’s not betrothed to anyone.

After a while you suggest that it’s probably better that you both get some sleep. Leuna starts at the word and as you get up to find yourself a comfortable place by the fire, she looks increasingly nervous. You ask her what’s wrong. 

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s just...” She looks across at you with surprising shyness. “I’ve never, ever slept with a man before.”

You spit out the mouthful of water you were just about to swallow and start to choke. Leuna looks at you in alarm, but you wave her off and cough your lungs free. 

She blushes. “I think maybe I said something strange. I do that sometimes.” She quickly explains that in the Academy, the male and female apprentices lived in separate quarters, only coming together occasionally for training.

You nod. It’s not an unusual situation. Leuna seems to have escaped a strict childhood to end up somewhere with just as little freedom, despite what she said.

You take the cloak and find a nice, secluded corner of the cave. Leuna sets up her own bedding in a different corner, across the campfire from you. 

The fire burns down to embers as you lie there, staring up at the shifting shapes of grey, red and blackness that make up the cave’s ceiling. Wrapped up in Leuna’s cloak there in the dark you become even more aware of her scent and it seems to have a soporific effect on you. You hear Leuna shifting herself to find a comfortable spot and not long afterwards you’re asleep.

\---------

Your sleep is not a restful one. After your mistreatment at the hands of the bandits, you seem to be too alert to enter deep sleep and keep waking up. Leuna seems to be asleep, though. There’s the occasional shifting of material on bare stone, the odd feminine murmur. 

You’ve almost struggled back to sleep when you hear Leuna stirring. She gets up and you hear her scrabbling around in the dark for a while. There’s the sound of the cap of a water skin being popped and drinking. Then you hear the pad of her feet as she leaves the cave. When she returns a short while later, you’ve almost drifted off to sleep again. 

But the soft padding of her feet on stone grows louder. Maybe she wants to ask you something. 

She says nothing, and instead lies down not far from you, where your bedding has spread out during your tossing and turning. What is she doing?

She sighs and murmurs, then, moments later, her gentle regular breathing tells you that she’s fallen asleep. She must have still been half-asleep after she woke up before and mistaken your bedding for hers when she came back.

You turn over and agonise over whether to wake her or not. It’s probably the right thing to do, but you have a sudden image of a half-asleep knight mistaking you for an assassin and breaking your neck. It would be a particularly tragic end to your adventure.

You’ve finally decided to get up and move to her bedding instead when you feel sleep finally getting its talons into you. You can barely lift a hand up off the floor. Maybe it’s having Leuna so close to you that you feel safe and protected.

Your thinking becomes stranger and stranger and before you realise it, you’re asleep and dreaming.

You dream that you’re on horseback, riding through a vaulted forest. The horse’s head is in front of you as you ride bareback, and you’re holding onto its mane. One either side of you, long, skilled, feminine hands are holding the reins. You can feel the warmth of brown arms resting on top of yours, the softness of breasts pressing against your back.

They belong to Leuna. You’re riding more-or-less in her lap.

You lean forward, worried that she’ll get the wrong idea, and try to put a little respectful space between the two of you. But then she takes a hand off the reins and you feel it slip across your chest.

“Stop squirming, my cute squire,” says Leuna from behind you. “You’ll fall off the horse.”

She presses you closer to her with her arm in a half-hug. Your struggling achieves nothing, since her strength is inexorable. Those breasts are squeezed against you again.

Fighting at this point seems stupid. You feel your desire to do so ebbing away as the warmth of her body spreads through you. Then she drops the other rein and her arm closes around you, completing the embrace. You feel the warm sweetness of her breath against the stop of your head. What’s the horse doing? He doesn’t seem to need direction anymore. You look up. 

There’s no horse’s neck there, no mane, no reins: just shadows and a warm orange glow.

You realise you’re awake. You’re in the cave where Leuna and you set up a campsite. And she got confused and came over to your bedding and...

And now she’s hugging you from behind.

You stiffen, wondering what the hell you should do. You try and lift one of her arms away, but it’s like struggling with a length of iron chain that’s wrapped around you. Leuna stirs and hugs you to her more closely. You can feel her face nuzzling into your hair.

You decide not to fight against her. Escape seems impossible, and anyway, being held by her is far from worst thing in the world. She’s warm and smells really good, and the firmness of her arms and stomach contrasted with the ample softness of her chest is starting to make you excited.

You flush hot, ashamed at your reaction. But even that is not enough to stop sleep reclaiming you. Being crushed in Leuna’s arms, you quickly begin to feel relaxed and safe and before you know it, you’re asleep again.


	2. Chapter 2

You wake up before Leuna does. Sometime during the night she must have finally released you from her embrace, since she’s lying on her back, her arms and legs splayed out, snoring lustily. You lift the single arm that’s lying on your chest and gingerly place it on the bedding. She stirs a little but doesn’t wake up.

You pad outside and stretch in the early morning air. It’s fresh and delicious. Here at the edge of the forest a great patch of sky is visible and the deep blue fills you with good cheer. 

You’re in a surprisingly good mood, you realise. You haven’t slept so soundly in years, even in your own bed back home. It must have been having Leuna beside you that did it. Maybe it’s just the way she smells so good...

You sniff yourself, expecting her delicious scent, but instead you just smell yourself. You grimace. If you’re travelling on your own, it doesn’t matter, but with her with you...

Stupid, she’s a knight. Like she cares whether you smell like sweat or not.

Still....

She looked like she was going to sleep for a little while longer. You’re probably going to be on horseback all day so this’ll likely be the only real chance you’ll get.

You walk down to the little river and follow it upstream a short way. There’s a spot there where under the shade of a willow the water has eaten the bank away and created a deep eddy outside of the main flow of the river. It’s the perfect spot to wash. 

You soon find it. The first sign is a _quillaja_ tree, not native to the area, planted there by a foresighted traveller from the hot south long, long ago. You strip a piece of bark from it and take it with you.

You peel off your tunic, wash some of the more offending parts with a quick scoop of water and then hang it in the branches of the willow to air. Then you slip gasping into the cold water and quickly duck your head under.

If you weren’t awake before, you certainly are now. You splash yourself with water and scrub under your arms, then snap the bit of bark that you stripped from the tree into two and rub it together. It’s an old traveller’s trick: there’s something in the wood that soaps up and creates a thick, scented foam in water, and you apply it quickly to your hair and offending parts of your body. Then you dive back under and rinse yourself. 

You pull yourself partway out of the water and lie against the slab of yellow rock beneath the willow. The sun has been on it for a while and so it’s warm. You put your underwear on it as well to hasten the drying process.

It’s then that you see her. If you hadn’t chanced to look in that direction at that precise moment, you probably never would have seen her. 

Leuna, watching you bathe.

You let your eyes slip off her without acknowledging that you saw her. She came looking for you, obviously, but why isn’t she making herself known?

Maybe too embarrassed.

Then why is she still there, watching you?

You’re filled with an odd mixture of shame and excitement. It’s a strange feeling. You lie back against the stone and close your eyes. Is she still looking at you? You’re sure you can feel her gaze.

Is she having a joke at your expense? You’re not exactly the best example of male physical perfection after all.

Then you realise she may have never seen a naked man before, even a half-naked one. The thought is so utterly adorable that you’re glad for the coldness of the water about you. It’s the only thing keeping you from getting so excited you’ll be unable to get out of the water.

You decide that your underwear and clothes are probably as dry as they’re going to get and so you slip out of the water. You’re careful to keep your back to her. She might be curious, but better not to shock her all at once. She can probably deal with a bare butt no problem. 

You retrieve your clothes and underwear as nonchalantly as you can and then secrete yourself behind the willow and give yourself a quick dry down. Then you dress yourself and make your way back to the cave.

Leuna is there when you get back. She’s stoked up the fire and has a little pot over it, boiling water.

She glances up at you, but just as quickly her eyes return to the task in front of her. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I sometimes sleep a bit heavily. The other girls at the Academy always used to tease me about it.”

You say something in reply, but you’ve forgotten it as soon as you say it. You’re too distracted by the blush you spotted on her face when she looked at you. So instead you remark about how good something smells.

“Oh, it’s just the tea,” she says.

Tea? You had it once. You come over and she opens the pot for you.

There are green leaves in there, swirling about in the steaming water. You say that the tea you had was black.

“Oh, yes, that’s the way most people drink it I suppose. But it’s just as nice green as well. It’s very invigorating.”

It’s soon ready and after a mouthful of rations you sit and enjoy the tea. It’s as delicious as Leuna says, although a little bitter.

You sit and drink in silence. After a while you mention to Leuna that there’s a good spot to wash if she wants a little upstream, and that she can’t miss it.

She’s flushing redder than usual, and she stammers a bit when she thanks you. But then she says, “Oh, do I smell bad?”

You swallow the hot tea already in your mouth and almost scald yourself as you stumble over your words saying that no, she doesn’t smell bad at all. In fact, she smells very nice. It’s just that you thought, maybe, after sleeping in a cave she might feel a bit more refreshed if...

You’re babbling and so you stop. 

Leuna seems amused by your outburst. But she shakes her head.

“We’ll reach the inn by this evening, right? And I’ll be able to get some proper hot water there.”

You nod. You feel pretty awkward all of a sudden, the feeling exacerbated by your sudden realisation why Leuna didn’t take up your offer.

She’s worried you’ll spy on her like she did on you.

The thought is distractingly exciting. Those long legs of hers, and those breasts you had pressed against your back last night. They must be pretty big.

After breakfast you get ready to depart. Leuna splashes some cold water on her face and make does with that. Then you’re on horseback again.

The day is as gorgeous as the early morning predicted. The forest behind you now, you proceed out onto the grasslands. Around you patches of the yellow prairie grasses are stroked by the breeze, like an invisible giant running his hand across them. Overhead, clouds like great white fairy castles march along the horizon. 

“Beautiful,” says Leuna. 

You agree. But they also make you nervous. The plains are well-known for flash flooding, and even when it’s not raining here there’s still a danger if the highlands are suddenly inundated with a downpour. 

Leuna nods and spurs her horse into a gallop. You make good time, but it’s hell on your butt and you feel like you might be thrown off at any moment.

“Are you alright back there?” asks Leuna.

You say that you are, but then the horse stumbles for a moment over some clayey soil and you yelp and grab onto Leuna, who yelps as well.

You apologise, but when you begin to remove your arms from around her waist, she reaches back with one hand and stops you.

“It’s safer if you hold on tight,” she says.

You’re glad she can’t see your blush.

As the day passes the grasslands give way to rocky tors and sandy defiles, the edges of the badlands that follow the meandering path of the Bihurri river. Deep and uncrossable and infested with swamp drakes, it’s an unavoidable part of the journey from the underpopulated northeast to the capital for those who want to avoid a long and circuitous, although safer, journey through the tiny hamlets of the valley of Motela.

“Is there really an inn around here?” asks Leuna as for hour after hour you only see eroded plateaus and the scattered stone rocky outcrops like precipitous mountains in miniature.

You laugh and tell her you don’t blame her for not believing you. The area seems desolate here, but you’ll soon reach the main road that comes down from the foothills of the mountains. There are many sulphur mines there, the precious substance that smells like rotten eggs but which is an essential part of alchemical magic. 

“So it’s true that Hiria has lights that stay on even during the night? Lights powered by alchemy?”

It’s hard to believe, but it’s true, you say. You’ve never seen it before, but you’ve heard many stories from journeyman merchants who make the journey between Ekiald and Hiria regularly.

“I can’t wait to see it,” she murmurs.

Soon a dark rectangle appears in the dying light of sunset at the side of the road before you: the Inn. After so many days in the wilderness, such a regular shape seems out of place.

The horse picks up speed.

“He can smell the other horses,” says Leuna patting the side of his neck. “And other horses means hay and water and all the creature comforts of home.”

You laugh. You feel the same way. The inn means hot water, and meat, and best of all _ale_.

“And we might be able to get you some new clothes,” says Leuna. 

It reminds you that you’re wearing the tunic she sewed for you from her own clothes. It gives you a warm feeling inside and you don’t know if you want to part with it.

Leuna pats the pouch at her waist. “There should be enough here to cover the both of us for the night.”

You put your hand on hers and tell her that she won’t need to spend any of her money. The owner of the inn is a friend of your family, and as merchants you often survive on this network of guest-friendship to avoid carrying around large sums of money unnecessarily. 

“Oh,” says Leuna. 

You realise then that’s she staring at your hand on hers. It was an instinctive gesture, but you quickly take it away. She doesn’t seem offended, though.

Soon you arrive at the inn and you both dismount to walk. It’s a low building, built of coastal oak, designed after the Hirian style, the façade decorated with a carved relief of a lion hunt. You run your fingers across the face of one of the lions, remembering the times you travelled here as a child. It’s as close as you ever got to Hiria and you start to wonder about your future

A servant you’ve met before comes out of the attached stables and stops and stares at the two of you. You stare back, wondering just what the problem is, but then you remember your own reaction to seeing Leuna for the first time.

You glance at her. In her armour, she really _is_ a tall and imposing figure.

The servant quickly remembers his manners and bows. “Young master,” he says, recognising you. “It’s been a while.” Leuna gets off the horse and he quickly bows to her, quite a bit lower you can’t help noticing. “Lady knight,” he says, his voice thick with respect. “You honour our humble establishment with your presence.”

Leuna seems startled by the effusiveness of his greeting and she inclines her head, blushing. She lets him take the reins and lead the horse to the stables.

“They don’t often see knights around here,” you tell her.

She nods. It’s so strange that a knight who showed no fear dealing with bandits now seems awkward and unsure of herself. You ask her what’s wrong.

“I... I’m not used to meeting strangers,” she admits.

“But I’m a stranger,” you say.

“You’re different,” says Leuna. 

Different. You’re about to ask her what she means by it when the door flies open and a big, buxom, red-faced woman bursts out and crushes you in a giant perfumed hug.

Leuna’s hand slips to her sword-hilt instinctively, but when she hears the woman call you by your name and sees the smile on your face she lets it slide off. 

“This is Kalbasa,” you say, your voice strained by the lack of air: her hug has managed to squeeze the majority of it from your lungs. “She’s the innkeeper.”

Kalbasa laughs and releases you. “Such a flatterer. Calling this tiny watering hole an inn!” She looks at the knight and laughs again, elbowing you in the ribs. “And you’ve brought a girl, I see. I knew you’d find one eventually.” She looks Leuna up and down and whistles. “It’s a good one, too.”

Leuna blushes fiercely under Kalbasa’s gaze. 

You babble a protest but Kalbasa just laughs. “You haven’t changed. Still can’t take a joke?” She grins at Leuna. “Am I right?”

Leuna smiles but doesn’t say anything. She’s still blushing.

Kalbasa leads you inside the inn and has another servant take your belongings to a room. She casts a critical eye over the two of you. “I’m betting you both need a hot bath. I’ll have one prepared for you.”

Leuna’s eyes immediately light up. “Oh, yes please!”

“I think I have a tub big enough to fit the two of you.”

Leuna’s smile falls from her face. “Oh! Together? But... but...”

Kalbasa laughs and you can’t help but smile a little at how flustered Leuna had become. It’s another of her jokes, you explain. 

“So, who want to get in first?”

You of course chivalrously allow Leuna to use the water first. When the knight protests, you remind her that you had a chance to wash in the morning while she didn’t.

Leuna goes an even deeper red and she ceases her protests and nods, defeated.

\----------

You’re sitting on a chair and looking out the window when Leuna returns from her bath. She’s got dressed in her clothes again, you notice, but her hair is wet and she’s still drying it as she walks into the room.

She’s shocked to see you there.

“Oh, but... are we going to sleep together again?” Then she remembers what that means and she adds, “In the same room, I mean.”

You tell her that the inn is usually full all year round, given the busyness of the sulphur road, but that Kalbasa keeps a room free for the exclusive use of guest-friends, who generally travel alone.

Leuna nods. “I’m lucky you have such good friends.” She sits down on the cot and busies herself with drying her hair. With her hair wet, her eyes seem somehow even larger than before, that glacial blue even deeper. With her small nose and that little sprinkling of freckles across her face she seems suddenly childish despite the years she has on you. And yet, there’s her exquisitely toned body beneath her tunic. Her long, bare arms and legs remind you of how tall she is. She’ll barely fit on the bed, you muse. 

You feel a certain heat start in your body and so you quickly start talking about Kalbasa, since that was the last thing Leuna mentioned, acting as though you’ve been staring into space and composing your words. She’s an old friend of your family, you explain, a retired warrior and despite her appearance she’s still lightening quick with a halberd.

Leuna nods. “I thought she might be. She walks like a trained fighter.” She turns to you, smiling. “She acts like she’s your mother, doesn’t she?”

You nod, embarrassed. She’s always poking fun at you, you say.

A surprisingly mischievous smile flickers onto Leuna’s lips and she lowers the towel from her hair. “About women?”

You chuckle and nod ruefully. Ever since you were a little kid she’s been trying to set you up. She says it’s not normal for a man not to be married.

“So you’re not married,” says Leuna. She says it like someone repeating a fact that they guessed at before.

You tell her that you guess you’ve never met the right person. Leuna says nothing, but is clearly weighing something up in her head.

“But men and women can meet each other freely in Elkiad, you said.”

You laugh. Meeting freely is one thing, but finding someone you like enough to marry is a lot more difficult. 

Leuna seems surprised by this. “But isn’t it just a case of meeting as many women as you can? I mean, sooner or later you’ll have to come upon your true love and then your eyes will meet and 'by that glance alone love will be kindled in both your hearts'.” She sighs. “That’s how it works, isn’t it?”

You wonder if she’s joking, but then you remember her sheltered upbringing. You ask her where she learned that.

She blinks at you. “From books, of course.”

You don’t need to ask what kind of books. The scenario is already playing out in your head: Leuna or a friend of hers smuggling a romance into their dormitory, the girls reading it under the candlelight, the artificial world within it strange and free and exciting.

The image makes your heart melt. You manage to stammer something about love being a bit more complicated than books make out but your words can’t help but sound unconvincing even to your own ears.

Leuna sits forward on the bed, eager to hear more. “Complicated? Oh yes, of course. The furtive glances and blushes, the confession of love, the suffering of lovers divided, the trials that must be undergone before they’re reunited, the wedding, the wedding-night...” She stops, blushing. Then she looks up at you, her huge eyes alight. “Have you ever been in love?”

You stare across at the beautiful woman sitting on the bed, wondering just how you should respond to such a question, when the servant knocks on the door to your room, announcing that Kalbasa has meat and ale ready for you.

\-----------

As soon as you return to the main room of the inn, Kalbasa sits you both down and slams two mugs of ale in front of you. The inn is not what you’d call crowded: it’s mostly the usual mix of trappers, sulphur miners and farmers that are the source of Kalbasa’s livelihood on top of the merchants that pass by along the coastal road to and from the capital.

She sees you looking around. “As you can see, business is booming.” She sighs. “It’s all down to that unpleasant business on the border. Like they say, war is bad for business.”

“But we’re not at war,” says Leuna. She’s been staring down at her drink the whole time. You’ve already attacked yours, the bitter soapy liquor restoring feeling back into your buffeted things and backside and smoothing over the lingering awkwardness of your conversation with Luena. “The treaty between the Regency and the Duchy...”

Kalbasa looks at Leuna with a motherly indulgence. “Dear, there may be treaties and all that, but when it comes to being at the pointy end, pieces of paper and expensive ink and fancy seals don’t count for much, unfortunately.” She turns to you. “There’ve been attacks along the road.”

“Bandits?” you ask.

“Do bandits want to cut down penniless sulphur-miners?” She shakes her head. “It’s just the Duke sowing terror through mercenaries since his army was routed.”

“But we haven’t heard anything about this at the Academy,” protests Leuna. “Someone needs to put a stop to it!” The fierce look of determination on her face is both impressive and adorable.

Kalbasa smiles at Leuna and then turns to you. “An idealist, too. That’s certainly a breath of fresh air around these parts. A few more like her and we might actually win this war.”

Leuna looks uncomfortable, but Kalbasa places a hammy hand on the knight’s delicate one and pats it. “Don’t mind me, dear. I’m just old and crotchety. I don’t mean any offence. And I agree with you. Something has to be done. But I’m afraid we’re pretty far down the Regent’s list of priorities...Well, enjoy your drinks.” She winks at you. “I guess this should all go on the family tab?”

You nod. 

Leuna is still staring down at her drink. “I feel bad having you pay for me. As soon as we reach the capital, I’ll pay you back for all this.”

You laugh and say she can if she wants, but it’s really not necessary. You owe her your life, after all, and while it’s not a particularly important one, it’s worth more than a few mugs of ale and rooms for the night.

Leuna nods. She’s still looking at her drink, so you tell her not to feel guilty and to drink it. It’s very good.

“But it’s alcohol,” she says. Then she blushes. “I... I’ve never drunk it before. It makes you act funny, doesn’t it?”

Funny? Well, if you drink too much it can certainly have that effect, but in moderation... You’re a bit taken aback that she’s never drunk before. You say that you never knew there was a rule in the Knightly Protocols that forbade it. 

“Oh, there isn’t,” says Leuna. “It’s just I guess that.... well, maybe I just never got the opportunity to try it.” She glances across at you. “This is another first for me, I guess.”

She lifts the mug to her lips and takes a sip. She grimaces. 

“It’s bitter!” she says.

You can’t help but laugh. “Ale is usually bitter,” you tell her. “It’s because of the hops in it.”

Leuna lifts the mug again, a little more tentatively this time, and takes a deeper drink. She coughs a little and she doesn’t seem to notice the white suds on her lip until you point them out. 

“It doesn’t taste bad,” she says as she wipes the foam from her top lip. She still seems a little unsure, though.

It’s then that Kalbasa appears with a little glass of a deep brown liquid. “Here,” she says, putting it in front of Leuna. “We don’t often have girls here, but this is more the sort of thing I like to drink.”

Leuna lifts it to her mouth and downs it in one go. 

“It’s delicious!” she cries.

Kalbasa, laughing, takes the glass from her. “Hey, hey. Take it a little easy there. That’s _patsharan_. It’s made from wild plums, and it might be sweet, but it’s very potent. That little glass was the same as two ales.”

Leuna lifts a hand to her lips. “Oh!”

Kalbasa slides Leuna’s ale across to you. “You look like you need another.” She glances at the knight. “You too. But sip it this time!”

Leuna watches her go, then turns and beams at you. “She’s very nice, isn’t she?”

You nod. You’re distracted, though, by the mug in front of you. The edge of mug where Leuna’s lips touched it is glistening. 

Can you really just take it and drink it? Isn’t it almost like sharing a kiss with her?

Leuna is staring at you, her smile slipping, and you panic that she thinks you’re hesitating over her mug because you’re concerned that it’s somehow dirty. You snatch it up and take a long draught.

Somehow, it’s far more delicious than your first one was. 

Kalbasa brings you more drinks and some food as well, and you’re soon enjoying yourselves. Leuna follows Kalbasa’s advice and sips at the powerful little drink, but soon her cheeks are flushed and you realise she’s already a bit tipsy.

“Oh, why did I leave it this long to try drinking?” she mutters. “It’s so wonderful!” She throws out her arms and almost knocks over your ale in the process.

You laugh and take her arm, trying to get her to settle down. She stares at your hand pressing against her bare skin.

“You have very soft hands,” she says suddenly.

You blink, self-consciously taking your hand away. Then you chuckle. Merchants are often accused of having soft hands, you say, since a lot of their business revolves around accounting and reading and not so much physical labour. 

Leuna frowns. “Oh, I hope I didn’t offend you. I wasn’t trying to criticise. I... I like it.” Then she seems to realise what she’s said, and she hurriedly adds, “I mean, I don’t hate it or anything. I mean, it’s fine. I mean, I’m a bit jealous, actually.” She lifts up her own hands and waves them at you. “Mine are all calloused.”

You look at her hands. They’re such delicate, slender hands. You can’t see the callouses that she seems to think are there. 

Such pretty hands, you muse. They were the first part of her you ever saw.

Leuna lowers her gaze to her drink and you see the rosiness of her cheeks spreading out in a blush.

You don’t quite know how to take her outburst, so you return to your drink. 

A short while later, the awkwardness seems to pass and you start to discuss the remainder of your journey. Despite Kalbasa’s warnings, the coastal road is probably your only option. Otherwise, you end up having to travel through the badlands you skirted the edge of yesterday which is something neither of you wants to do. Waterless and rough, they’re the home of scorpions and venomous sand-drakes and other unpleasant creatures. 

Taking the coastal road you should be in Hiria in about two days, you say. For some reason, discussing the end of your journey makes you unhappy.

Well, of course it does. Once you arrive there, you’ll have to say goodbye to Leuna. She’ll swear fealty to the regent and live in the castle, while you’ll go on to your new job in the merchant’s quarter. You suddenly don’t relish the idea.

You push such negative thoughts out of your head. You’re just enjoying the freedom of the road, that’s all. It’s always like this at the end of a journey...

And yet...

You glance across at Leuna as she sips her drink. Out of her armour, she seems like a normal woman. Well, not normal exactly. Every other time you’ve been with a woman in this kind of situation, it’s felt hideously awkward. Every time you’ve met potential matches, there’s been nothing to talk about. Women in the East seem like a breed apart from men, only coming together really for romantic assignations and marriage. Strange, given how free everyone is to mingle, so different from how Leuna was brought up. You guess it’s really just segregation under a different name.

Leuna. She’s so pretty, and yet she doesn’t even seem to realise it. She’d never drunk alcohol before tonight, or seen a man naked until you, and her ideas of love are those of a child, and yet the masterful way she saw those bandits off, her courage and her graceful skill with the sword and crossbow...

You finish your drink and wait for another, suddenly gripped by the desire to drink yourself stupid.

But Kalbasa seems busy. While you’ve been drinking, a small group of men has come into the Inn. They’re wearing mismatching leather armour and their unshaven and dust-streaked faces indicate they’ve been on the road for a while. There seems to be a bit of an argument going on, but it’s soon resolved as they take off their swords and hand them to the innkeeper. They take a table not far from yours, laughing. They’re words are tinged with the accent of border-men, and you wonder what they’re doing so far south.

“So much for the famous southern hospitality,” says their leader, a surprisingly young looking man, even despite the weeks of unruly beard and the stringiness of his black hair. He sits down with the others and starts speaking in a distinct brogue that you can’t understand a word of. The others laugh.

“Milady, ale!” he cries out. On his lips even the honorific lady sounds like the vilest of insults.

Kalbasa brings them their drinks and after serving them with stoic dignity despite their jests she brings your drinks over.

“Who are they?” whispers Leuna. It’s not really that soft a whisper and you realise that Leuna seems more than a little tipsy.

Kalbasa pats the air with her hand, indicating that Leuna shouldn’t talk so loud. “Mercenaries, I’m guessing. There’s been more and more of them around lately, since the attacks on the sulphur mines.”

“Are the on our side or the duke’s?” you say.

Kalbasa shrugs. “Who can tell? Trouble, regardless. Still, their money is honest, as the saying goes.”

She returns to busying herself cleaning behind the bar while you and Leuna get to work on your fresh drinks. The men on the other table are increasingly boisterous and it’s hard to talk.

You’re in the middle of discussing your plans for tomorrow when one of them gets up and walks over to your table. It’s the man you took to be their leader.

“Excuse me milady,” he says. His bow to Leuna is just short enough to be insolent, while you receive a grin and an incline of the head. “I couldn’t help but overhear you earlier, inquiring as to who we are. My name is Lazgarri and these worthies are my companions.”

There’s a drunken cheer from the other two men as they lift their mugs.

“Like you, we are keepers of the peace. Perhaps you would like to join us later and discuss matters of mutual interest? Swordplay, perhaps?” On the other table his men start to laugh, although only a thin, mocking smile appears on his own face. 

“You will find me and my men more than capable in that regard.” He finally glances at you. “I suspect your young companion here knows very little about ‘swordplay’.”

You start to say something but Leuna interrupts you. “Thank you for your kind offer, but I’m afraid we have our journey to discuss. If you’ll excuse us...”

Lazgarri’s smile deepens. “Oh, but it won’t take but a moment. And your friend can watch. He might learn a thing or two about the best way to fit a sword in a scabbard...”

You stand up, livid, but Leuna puts her hand on yours. You’re so surprised by her touch that you forget your angry retort and stare down at her hand.

Lazgarri looks at the two of you and chuckles. “Ah, so that’s how it is.” With an insolent bow he returns to his table.

The men’s conversation starts up again, punctuated by even louder laughter. Leuna has taken her hand from yours, and as you sit down you feel yourself gnawed by shame. 

You ask Leuna why she was so polite to him. As a knight, surely she takes insults to her honour even more seriously than ordinary people?

Leuna sighs. “It’s against the protocols for a knight to fight anyone other than another knight over a matter of honour.” She glances across at the mercenaries. “Although it _would_ be a pleasure to teach him to keep a civil tongue in his head.”

After a while Leuna excuses herself from the table to talk to Kalbasa, who gives her directions and indicates the front door. You sit there and nurse your drink and your anger, feeling worthless.

Not long after Leuna gets up, Lazgarri joins you at the table. This time he sits across from you. He’s wearing that same insolent smile. 

“Well, my hat’s off to you, son,” he says. “She’s a juicy little piglet. But I guess you wouldn’t know about that, would you?” He laughs and shouts out to Kalbasa. “Another drink for my friend here!”

You mutter something noncommittal. 

“She looks to me to be a virgin,” he says suddenly. “Ah, you don’t want a virgin. Not for your first time. You should let us teach her a thing or two about pleasing a man. It’s a service we offer to young Easterners as yourself. Warming up frigid bitches.”

His use of that word to refer to Leuna sends you over the edge. You slowly stand up, your hands trembling, and demand that he take it back.

“No need to take it personally,” the man says, standing up. His smile is gone. “You should watch your step. We’re far out of the capital here, son, and as far as the Regent is concerned, we’re the law out here. Your little friend might play at being a knight, with her crescent brooch and her shiny armour, but around here she’s just another whore.”

You smash your fist into his face. It’s a wild punch but there’s a satisfying crunch as your fist strikes his jaw. It’s a glancing blow, though, weak due to your lack of training and drunkenness, and Lazgarri grabs your arm, capitalising on your overreach, and pulls you over the table. Your feet skitter across its surface as you try to regain your footing, then you’re flung to the ground. You swing to face him and he grabs you by the collar and jerks your head forward to where a glinting blade has appeared in his other hand.

“Not a smart move, son,” he says, a trickle of blood in the corner of his mouth. “No one draws my blood and lives. But I guess it’s probably kinder this way. You won’t have to watch us rape your girl.”

There’s a sharp whizz and a sudden splash of blood across your neck. You cry out, thinking that he’s just stabbed you. But there’s no pain. It’s not your blood.

Lazgarri stumbles back clutching his hand. There’s a bolt sticking clear through it.

Leuna is in the doorway, leaning against the doorpost and steadying her crossbow. She doesn’t seem very sure on her feet. 

She points the weapon at the ground and is still fumbling to reload when Lazgarri’s two companions push themselves from their seats. They’re going to rush her, you realise, and before you consciously make any decision you’ve already flung yourself across the floor at them. You pull one to the ground and the two of you, struggling, kick the feet out from under the other. 

They’re far stronger than you. The one you grabbed knees you in the stomach and gets on top of you and starts to give your face a painful drubbing with his drunken fists. But he stops when the blade of a halberd appears at his neck and you scramble out from underneath him and get to your feet, rubbing at the blood pouring from your nose.

Kalbasa is holding the halberd’s shaft. “It’s been a few years and a few pounds since I’ve used this,” she says quietly. “But you never forget how to split a man’s skull in half.”

Leuna has managed to reload the crossbow and is pointing it at Lazgarri, although he doesn’t seem much of a threat anymore, sitting back against a table and clutching his dripping hand. You decide it’s prudent to get out of the way and join her. With her free arm she draws you behind her, placing herself between you and the others.

Your hand staunching the blood from your nose, you tell her you thought she wasn’t allowed to get involved in matters of honour with commoners.

Leuna glances back at you and laughs. “As soon as you punched him it became a matter of public order.”

With Kalbasa’s help, Leuna binds the arms of the two men behind their backs and herds them out the door. Lazgarri, not needing to be bound, nurses the dripping bolt in his hand and says nothing as he follows up behind.

Once outside, one of the men says something about their horses. Kalbasa roars with laughter.

“What’s the penalty for public disorder under Regency law?” she asks, turning to Leuna.

“A fine of a hundred crowns,” says the knight, grim-faced.

“You three don’t look you have any money on you, so your weapons and horses will do,” she says. “Unless you prefer the gentle delights of the debtor’s prison.”

The men mutter and make no move to leave but then Lazgarri comes up behind them and starts to kick them and shove them with his uninjured hand. To the accompaniment of the vilest of curses they start moving on down the road.

“They’ll be back,” you say as you take the rag Kalbasa hands you and apply it to your nose.

Kalbasa just laughs again. “I’ll send word around. There’ll be a dozen miners with pickaxes here tomorrow morning. If they want to get themselves killed, they’re welcome to try.”

She busies herself throwing sand on the trail of blood and the few other guests at the inn go back to what they were doing. You sit down with Leuna at a different table. She gingerly unloads the bolt from her crossbow and places it on the table. 

She notices you looking at it and smiles. “I always keep a weapon with my horse, just in case.”

You remove the rag from your nose. The bleeding seems to have slowed somewhat. Leuna takes the rag from your hand despite your protests.

“Put your head back,” she says, forcing you to do it even as she gives you advice. She applies the rag to your nose, dabbing at the blood still there.

Embarrassed by her attentions, you distract yourself from the gentle strength of her hand cradling your head and tell her she’s an amazing shot. Even tipsy she only just missed shooting the knife out of Lazgarri’s hand.

“Oh no,” says Leuna. “I was aiming for his hand this time.” Then she blushes. “I’m just lucky they didn’t spot me there in the doorway while I was getting my hand steady. Otherwise it might have been your hand I shot.” She places her hand on yours. “It’d be a dreadful crime to have hurt this pretty hand.”

Your hand, ‘pretty’? You’re not sure how you feel about that.

“I guess he must have said something pretty insulting to you to make you punch him,” says Leuna. 

You shake your head and explain that it was something he said about her that made you punch him.

Leuna frowns. “About me? What did he say?”

You blush and tell her that you can’t repeat it. 

Leuna looks at you, a strange expression on her face. Is she disappointed at you? Does she feel insulted that you took it upon yourself to defend her honour?

“You didn’t need to do that,” she says. “He could have killed you.”

You say there was no way you were going to let him insult you and get away with it.

A shy smile breaks onto the lady knight’s face. She dabs your nose a last few times then lets you put your head forward again. 

The bleeding seems to have stopped.

Kalbasa comes and brings you some new drinks and after all the excitement of the fight the two of you quickly find yourself drinking one after the other.

Something seems to be on Leuna’s mind. In a lull in the conversation she suddenly bursts out with:

“I have a confession to make!”

You almost spit out your drink. A confession?

“This morning,” she begins, then hesitates before the rest of the sentence comes out in a whispered rush. “When I woke up, you weren’t there and I was worried something had happened to you, so I went looking for you and found you in the river and I saw you bathing and you were, uh, naked and...”

She sighs. “...and I’m sorry.”

You laugh and tell her not to be work herself up about it. You’re not offended. Lots of people have seen you naked before.

“Really?” Leuna’s voice is scandalised, and you realise she has the wrong idea. You quickly explain to her about the public baths in the East.

“Oh,” says Leuna. “Of course. I’ve heard of them. Do... do men and women really bathe naked in the East? I mean, together?”

Yes, you say. But not in the public baths, since they’re usually segregated.

“Oh,” she says. Somehow she sounds disappointed.

Soon it gets late, and Leuna sighs. “We’ll have to sleep. I mean, get some sleep, since we’re riding tomorrow.” She stands up and almost trips over, but you’re out of your seat in a second and supporting her. 

“Thanks,” she says. “I must be really sleepy.”

You tell her she’s probably just drunk.

“Oh,” she says. “So this is what being drunk feels like?” 

She didn’t really drink that much, but not being used to it it’s gone to her head. You help her up the stairs as Kalbasa leads you to your room. You imagine you look ridiculous beside someone so much taller and imposing than you are, but the warmth of her body, the mixture of softness and firmness as she leans against you more than makes up for it.

“Why does your hair smell so good?” she suddenly murmurs.

It’s a question that doesn’t really expect an answer, you decide, your heart skipping a beat.

Kalbasa opens the door for you. You guide Leuna inside and sit her on the bed, then turn to the innkeeper and thank her. 

“Goodnight,” she says with a wink, closing the door.


	3. Chapter 3

You lie on the bed, staring up at the darkened ceiling while Leuna lays out her cloak and baggage preparing her own makeshift bed on the floor. Unlike the other night, it’s only a foot away from you. There was an argument about who would get the bed, and Leuna won.

“I’ve been sleeping rough for years now,” she told you. “And anyway, I’ve never really liked beds. Too soft. They make me toss and turn.”

You continued to protest that there was no way a man could let a woman sleep on the floor while he took a bed, but Leuna just picked you up bodily and tossed you onto it, laughing. Mortified, you gave up at that point. 

She grabbed you and lifted you almost as if you weighed nothing. You feel like your masculine pride should be hurt. And yet...

There was something awfully nice about being carried in her arms, if only for a second.

As she makes herself comfortable, memories of the previous night come flood back, how she came to your bedding and spooned you from behind, how good she’d smelled, how warm her embrace had been, her breasts pressed against your back...

Despite everything that happened today and all the ale you’ve drunk, you just can’t seem to get to sleep. 

Maybe your raging erection has something to do with it.

“Can’t sleep either?” comes Leuna’s voice from the floor.

You mutter in the affirmative, your face growing hot even though there’s no way Leuna can tell your present condition in the dark. 

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “I... I’m not really used to sleeping on my own.” She explains that she mostly slept in dormitories, both at school in her little hometown and at the Academy. 

“But never with a boy, right?” You remember her earlier words.

There’s an embarrassed silence, and you imagine you can almost hear her face turning red. 

“So, you usually sleep alone, then?” she asks at last.

You’re a little taken aback by the question, but you realise she’s asking it literally. You laugh and tell her that although you’d prefer not to, it’s the way things usually turn out, even when you’re not traveling out on the road. 

Silence. You turn over, thinking that the conversation is over. Then you hear Leuna say your name.

You murmur sleepily.

You hear the rustling of material and the soft pad of a footstep. You open your eyes and Leuna is standing beside the bed, a tall shadow in the starlight.

“Move over,” she says. “I hate talking to the ceiling.” 

You think you’ve misheard her, but when she stays standing there you move aside. There’s not really enough room and you’re squeezed up against the wall as she gets into the bed, but your heart is beating so rapidly that you wouldn’t have cared if you were left clinging to the edge.

Leuna is lying on her side, her face flush with yours. You move your legs in an attempt to keep her from noticing your erection and your toes touch her shins.

She really _is_ tall.

“You punched him really hard,” she says. Her breath is sweetly fragrant. She must have brushed her teeth with some herb or other while she was taking a bath.

“What?”

“Lazgarri. It wasn’t a bad punch. A bit wild, but there was a lot of strength behind it.”

Why is she talking about that all of a sudden?

It’s hard to concentrate with her body so close to yours. You’re familiar with her back, her wide shoulders and hips and her narrow waist, since you’ve been riding behind her, but with her front within touching distance.... You feel the warmth of her body bleeding off her, the cotton of her undertunic brushing against the bare skin of your legs and arms.

“Why were you so angry?” she asks.

It takes you a moment to realise she’s still talking about the fight with Lazgarri. You tell her that you were couldn’t stand the thought of someone talking about her that way.

She moves herself closer. The softness of her breasts press against your chest. “So you were defending my honour, then?”

You swallow and say that you guess you were.

“No man has ever done that for me before,” she says. “I guess since I’m a knight they think I can look after myself.”

It sounds like she’s offended, and you mutter an apology. In the East, you say, it’s expected for a man to stand up for....

Her arms wrap around you, then, and she hugs you to her.

“Silly,” she says, nuzzling her face into your neck, your face covered by her soft, fragrant hair. “I’m not angry. I’m happy. Really happy.”

You feel hot wetness against your skin and at first you think she’s crying. But then you feel the hardness of teeth and light suction as she kisses your neck. 

You go stiff, barely believing what’s happening. Leuna’s kisses are wet, awkward but eager. Her hands slip down your back to your butt and she squeezes it. She sighs. “I wondered what that would feel like.” Then her hands slip under the hem of your shirt. She draws her fingertips across your bare back and you swallow, hard.

“Your skin is really soft,” she murmurs. “Just like your hands.”

Leuna explores your body, running her fingers over your ribs and then splaying them out across your chest. All the while she’s breathing heavily against your neck, peppering it with clumsy kisses that are really more like licking bites.

Tiring of this, she rolls you bodily onto your back and straddles you. She’s heavy and the weight of her pushes the air from your lungs. Leuna chuckles and leans forward, taking the majority of her weight off you and at the same time bringing her face flush with yours again.

“Sorry,” she says. Her breathing caresses your lips, the scent of her breath maddeningly delicious. “I... I can’t stop myself. Does alcohol have this effect too?”

You’re really in no position to give her a comprehensible answer. All you can feel is the gorgeous weight of her body covering yours, her knees squeezing your legs together, her stomach flush against your own, her large breasts with the nipples hard behind the cotton brushing against your chest as she starts to lick your neck again. You wonder why she hasn’t tried to kiss you yet, and you realise she probably has no idea how. 

You lean down and intercept her mouth with your own and she sighs as you take first her bottom lip and then the top and mouth them, touching them gently with the tip of your tongue. She soon realises she’s supposed to do the same and she kisses you back, hard, bruising your lips and slipping her hot tongue across your teeth. She’s clearly never kissed before. The thought makes your heart melt and you grow even more excited. 

You pull her body down closer onto your own as you continue to ward off her more dangerously enthusiastic kisses. You need to feel her on top of you, like before. Her breasts squash up against your chest and you feel the heat between her legs as her pelvis weighs down on your hardness.

Leuna gasps and stops kissing you. You feel her move her pelvis against you.

“Oh. That’s it, isn’t it? Your...” Her voice drops to a whisper. “Your _thing_.” She moves her hips again. “It’s really hard,” she mutters, to herself more than anyone else. The pressure sends a delicious shiver up your spine.

You pant as she begins to rub against you. The warmth and weight of her on top of you while she rubs herself against you sends spears of delight exploding in your head. Leuna’s voice is heavy with tipsy desire as she, too, pants against your mouth. She’s too distracted by what’s happening elsewhere in her body to try and kiss you anymore, and so you take the chance to attack her chin and neck with your lips. Leuna starts moaning and you feel yourself getting close. You slip your hands down her back, your fingers tracing her musculature under the soft cotton, delighting in the superb toning of her body, until you reach her hips. You grab them and pull her down closer as she rolls her pelvis against yours, moaning and arching her back. Her face is too far away now for you to reach it with your kisses, so you lay back, focussed on the incredible waves of pleasure flowing through you.

You don’t have far to go, but you grit your teeth, desperately trying to hold on until Leuna reaches her peak of pleasure as well. Luckily, you don’t have long to wait. Her humping becomes feverish and she starts crying out with short, sharp, desperate panting gasps. Then her body starts to shudder and she gives out a strangled cry, muffled by her bitten lip. 

The shuddering of her exquisite body against yours does the trick. You let yourself go and you come, every ounce of strength transmuted into divine pleasure as you feel your hardness spasming between the two of you.  
Leuna collapses on top of you, her breasts flattening against your neck and shoulders. You’re completely covered by her warm body, the weight of her on top of you somehow making the ebbing waves of pleasure all the more delicious.

The thought of what a waste it is to come inside your underclothes rather than inside her keeps running through your head. But you’re glad you were able to make her climax as well, at least. 

You hear Leuna murmur something, but it’s too hard to make it out, since her voice is muffled by your pillow. The sound that soon follows it is unmistakeable, though.

Snoring. The loud snoring of someone who’s plunged straight down into drunken sleep.

You try and squirm yourself out from under her, but she’s too heavy. You finally give up and make do with finding a spot where you at least you can breathe freely. 

\--------

You wake to find that Leuna is no longer on top of you. She’s nowhere to be seen. Alarmed, you leap out of bed, throw your clothes on and go looking for her. It’s well past dawn, daylight pouring in through every window.

Kalbasa spots you as you run down the stairs. “She’s outside getting her gear ready,” she tells you. There’s a lewd grin on her lips. “She was blushing like a schoolgirl when she came downstairs earlier. Did you have anything to do with that?”

You mutter something intelligible as you feel your face growing hot again. You step past her out into the cold, mist-laden air and hop your way to the stables.

Leuna is there, just as Kalbasa said. She’s just finished packing a saddlebag and is checking how it’s sitting on her horse’s back when she hears you and turns.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

She doesn’t seem to want to meet your eyes. You apologise to her for sleeping in.

“It’s my fault,” she says. “I saw you sleeping there and you looked so peaceful I didn’t want to wake you.”

With the words a deep blush settles onto her face. She glances at you then, and when she sees you share her embarrassment a shy smile appears on her lips. 

“You should go and get your things ready,” she says.

“But I don’t have anything,” you reply. 

The knight shakes her head. “Kalbasa left you some new clothes in the room, so you won’t need to wear that silly thing I made for you anymore.” She looks across at you. “She’s a very kind woman, isn’t she?”

You agree. 

An awkward silence settles over the two of you then, and so you tell Leuna you’ll go get ready and hurry back to the inn.

Like Leuna said, there’s stuff waiting for you in the corner of the room. In your haste you hadn’t noticed it. You take up the clothes and stare at them. You’re not thrilled with the thought to having to part with the tunic you’re wearing. It’s thick with Leuna’s scent and as you smell it you heart skips a beat. 

Regretfully you strip it off, put on the new clothes and hurry down the stairs. Leuna is there at the front door, thanking Kalbasa profusely.

The round woman shakes her head. “It was a pleasure having such a well-bred young woman patronise my little watering hole,” she says. “Especially one who’s such a good shot with the crossbow.” She glances at you and her smile takes on a conspiratorial look. “Just promise me that you’ll keep this guy out of trouble. As you can see, he’s not that great at looking after himself. He needs a strong woman to protect him.”

You start to protest, but you really don’t have anything you can say in your defence. Your silence just makes Kalbasa laugh and even Leuna can’t hide an amused smile.

You say your goodbyes and then you’re on the road again. Leuna’s horse is rested and champs at the bit, eager to continue the journey. The saddlebags behind your legs are full. Kalbasa has been more than generous in her provisioning and you resolve to make sure she’s well compensated for all of the help she’s shown you.

For a long while you ride in silence. The new clothes make you itch and you again regret having to change out of the tunic that served you so well. Missing Leuna’s scent, you lean forward, hugging her to you. The smell of her, the feeling of her toned waist against your forearms sends you straight back to last night, when her delightful weight was covering you. You sigh and can’t resist resting your head against her back.

Leuna stiffens. “Please,” she says. “You’re holding on too tight.”

Her voice is as tense as her body is and so you stop squeezing her and lift your head from her back.

“Thank you,” she says.

After that you ride in silence along the coastal road. The sea has come into sight and you want to mention it, but the silence has become so heavy between you that you have no idea how to bring it up. Instead you just stare out across the white-tufted breakers scouring the long crescent of grey beach in the distance and wonder what has happened between the two of you.

She must be regretting last night, you decide. Well, she is a virgin, after all. Doing something like that is a pretty big deal. And your first time doing stuff like that can be awkward. The way she kissed you clumsily, the eager, hungry way she took her pleasure from you. Maybe she’s a bit ashamed of how strongly she felt.

But you know you’re deluding yourself. The answer is obvious, and painful.

She just regrets doing it with _you_.

You feel a dark weight press down on your heart as you go over everything Leuna has said to you since then. The more you think about it, the more it seems the only explanation. 

Even with her body next to yours, she feels like she’s a thousand leagues away.

You berate yourself for not having dealt with the situation better. Of course she wouldn’t do anything with you unless she was drunk. When was the last time a woman slipped herself into your bed and started kissing you and squeezing your butt?

As you wrestle with such thoughts the coastal road curves inland to avoid a series of impassable rocky promontories, bringing it close along the border of the same badlands it skirted earlier. The scent of stone and dust replaces the fresh salty air of the ocean and soon craggy outcrops and narrow ravines become the only landscape.

You feel the silence of the place all the more heavy because of the silence between you and Leuna. You want more than anything else to squeeze yourself close to her, to feel safe, but now you’re just alone again and the loneliness is far worse than it ever was before.

The horse stumbles. Leuna reins him in and then turns to you.

“The road seems really rough from here. We’ll have to walk, I think.”

You nod. She leaps off the horse and takes your hand. The feeling of her hand in yours is tormenting, now. You remember how she ran her fingers across your chest, how adorably shy they were despite her drunken eagerness. 

You glance at her as she helps you down off the horse. She’s not really looking at you.

So that’s how it is.

You drop her hand and she takes the reins and leads her horse. You bring up the rear. 

As you walk, Leuna leads the horse around the worst of the fallen scree and you look up at the ridges on either side of you. The defile is becoming narrower. There’s little or no vegetation. Somehow, the bleakness is appropriate. It looks just like you feel right now: empty, windswept.

You smile bitterly. The situation is making you think like an angsty poet. It’s not a good look for you, you decide. 

To your left, rocks slide down the slope of the ravine to clatter onto its stony floor. Probably just some animal. The stone here is brittle and the slightest touch makes it sheer off.

The track turns around an outcropping of stone and suddenly Leuna stops. You come up beside her. 

There’s been a huge rock-fall. The track is completely blocked by great slabs of stone that have collapsed from the ridges almost meeting above your head.

A single rock clatters down from above. Leuna moves closer to you, bringing her arm against your chest.

A flicker. A whispering hiss and something skitters and snaps on the rock in front of you.

It’s a crossbow bolt.

Leuna picks you up bodily and throws you onto the horse and then leaps on behind you. Her arms circle around you as she grips the reins and a heartbeat later the horse turns and breaks into a gallop. 

Then the air is alive with hissing.

As the horse negotiates the uneven ground, Leuna leans down over you, covering you with her body. There’s hissing and snapping as quarrel after quarrel glances off her armour.

The horse gallops headlong back through the ravine. There must be crossbowmen stationed all the way along as the bolts don’t let up. You’re rocked back and forth as the horse tries to keep its feet on the scree-covered floor, but Leuna keeps you held tightly to her. She guides the horse through the maze of rocks and broken stone, where a single wrong hoof-fall means a broken leg for the horse and death for the two of you. 

There’s more hissing. A bolt glances off Leuna’s shoulder, the broken head landing on the horse’s mane in front of you. 

You throw it off. It’s barbed.

You can see the end of the ravine in sight. Near it there are horsemen milling around. It takes them a long while to notice you; you’re appearance seems to have caught them totally off-guard.

Leuna twists the reins and the horse goes climbing up the gentler slope of the start of the ravine. The horsemen waiting for you don’t seem to have expected this either. Foam sprays from the horse’s mouth and it whinnies in terror as its hooves send dust and rock flying, then it breaches the top of the ridge and starts half-sliding, half-galloping down the other side.

Farther along the ridge the way you came you see a number of men in leather armour on foot carrying crossbows. There’s shouting and a frenzy of activity as they kneel and fire.

Leuna jerks the reins and the horse skids sideways. Hissing bolts strike her armour. If she hadn’t turned they probably would have all ended up in you.

Leuna spurs the horse to get you out of range as you’re enveloped in a seemingly endless rain of bolts. The hissing is incessant, and then Leuna screams and the reins on your left fall slack.

You turn in panic to see a quarrel sticking out of her shoulder. It’s a lucky shot, striking her at the point where her cuirass is tied to her bracer. There’s blood everywhere, her arm lying limply at her side.

You cry out her name but she just shakes her head and hisses at you to keep your head down as she pushes you flatter against the horse’s neck.

“Take the other rein!” she cries.

You do as she says. The hissing continues for a short while and then it stops. But you can still hear the rumbling of hoof-falls behind you.

“It’s Lazgarri,” says Leuna. “Damn. Walked into that ambush like a clueless acolyte.” She slaps the reins and you do the same. She grimaces with the pain of her exertion. “We’ve one chance. The badlands.”

You’re about to protest, but you know she’s right. There’s no way you’ll outrun the others with no-doubt fresh horses waiting for you along the coastal road. In the badlands at least you have a chance.

A stray shot skitters on the rocks just ahead of you. 

At least the sand-drakes don’t have crossbows, you decide. 

With her you pull the horse to the right and press out across the broken stony and sandy landscape. You gallop for what feels like an eternity, but soon the sound of the hoof-falls fall away behind you. There’s the half-hearted thrum of a crossbow being fired, but the quarrel doesn’t make it anywhere near you.

Leuna, as soon as it seems safe, lets go of the rein and slumps over you. Her face is a rictus of pain as she clutches the end of the quarrel with her good hand.

Of course. The quarrel is barbed. Every jolt of the horse, every move of her arm is lacerating the wound. She must be in agony, and yet she managed to bear it until you were safe. 

You grab hold of the reins and lead the horse at a walk down a hundred little gullies and tracks. It’s a maze, and even if Lazgarri and his men wanted to keep pursuing you, there’s no way they’d be able to find you. Not even the best tracker can track across stone.

Over your shoulder you ask Leuna if she’s okay. It’s a stupid question.

“Yes,” she says, through agony-gritted teeth. “Not poisoned, at least. Stuck in the muscle. Lucky shot.”

You glance down at the saddlebags, remembering that you saw Leuna pack some medical supplies from Kalbasa in them. You rein in the horse and dismount.

You have Leuna lie down across the horse’s back, holding the bolt steady while you lead the horse as slowly as you can. You soon find a rocky outcropping with a cave beneath it. It’s nothing like the beautiful little grotto you stayed in in the forest, but right now it looks like paradise. You tie the horse up against the trunk of a straggling tree next to a steep slope and help Leuna down off its back. She’s heavy, especially in her armour, but pulling her across onto the slope at the same height as the horse’s back minimises the pain and damage you cause. 

With her leaning against you, you take her under the overhanging. 

“Help me take off my armour,” says Leuna in a hiss. She’s obviously in even more pain now. You do as she says, following her instructions. Removing armour is no easy business but you manage to do it, even with fumbling fingers.

Now out of danger, you feel your nerves catching up with you. You start shivering uncontrollably.

Leuna. Without her protecting you with her body, you would have been slain for sure. It would be your body that was pierced by those cruel bolts rather than hers. 

Having stripped her of her armour you stand there, staring at the bolt sticking out of her. You can clearly see now that it’s pierced her between her armpit and her left breast. There’s so much blood, some of it already dry and caked on her caramel-brown skin. 

Leuna looks up at you. “You’re going to have to cut the tunic off me. The blood is sticking it to the wound.”

You blink at her, but then you realise the sense of her order. Clearly she can’t do it herself. Taking a knife from the saddlebag of equipment Kalbasa left you, you cut the tunic from her shoulder and begin to peel it off. It’s stuck with some blood, and so you use some water to help. Leuna grimaces at the stinging cold of it and at the rawness of the wound. 

Peeled back, her left arm and shoulder are bare. Her breasts are bound with a cotton wrapping which has been partly torn by the entry of the bolt. It, too, is caked thick with blood.

“That will need to go too,” she says, manages a weak smile. 

You do as she says. Your hands are trembling as you touch her, half worried that you’ll hurt her, half ashamed of how the touch of her bare skin makes you feel. You cut through the layers of cotton and strip it back, baring her breast in the process. She’s just as busty as you expected.

You respectfully keep your eyes averted and apply some more water to the now-clear wound. You move to put down the knife, but Leuna stops you with her able hand.

“Just one more thing needs to be cut,” she says.

You look at her in confusion, but as she smiles at you wanly you realise what she’s talking about. The bolt. Sticking between the muscles of her arm and shoulder, there’s no way she can remove it herself. And the barbs mean it will need to be cut out.

And you’re the only one that can do it.

You pick up the knife, your hand shaking. It was hard enough cutting her out of her clothes, and now she expects you to cut into her body as well? But you have to. You’ve seen what happens to wounds where a foreign body has remained in the body to fester and poison the blood.

At the thought, your hand starts shaking even more. Leuna takes hold of it with her good hand, but even that movement makes her wince. She struggles to smile as she says, “Hey. If you keep shaking like that, you’re likely to cut my arm off.”

Her touch calms you. You feel hot with shame that in her time of need you’re behaving like this, so you grit your teeth and get to work.

\-------

By the end of it, your hands are red with her blood, but on the scrap of bandage before you is the barbed head of the bolt: you managed to get it out.

Leuna looks up at you as she spits the stick from her mouth and pushes a wad of bandages up against the freely-bleeding wound.

“You did a great job,” she whispers. “I barely felt anything.”

You look across at her wanly smiling face and you wonder how one person can have so much strength. You want to throw your arms around her and hug her, but your hands are wet with her blood, and she’s wounded...

...and then there’s that distance between you since last night.

Leuna notices the confusion on your face and she sighs.

“Can you help me with bandaging this up?”

You nod. There’s no time to be mooning around. You quickly wash your hands, douse her wound with water, apply some medicinal herbs to help fight infection and then bind it with fresh bandages.

At last you’re done. Leuna touches your hand with her good one and holds it against her chest. Her skin feels cool for some reason, possibly from the blood loss.

“Your hands,” she whispers. “They’re not just pretty, are they? They’re healing hands as well.”

She lays back, still clutching your hand in hers. You sit down beside her and help her to get comfortable.

“I’m going to pass out for a little while,” she says. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

You tell her there’s no way you’ll ever leave her side. The words come out so heartfelt that you groan inwardly at your how pathetic you must sound... but Leuna is grinning at you.

“My, my. Is that a proposal?” She closes her eyes. “You know, if you weren’t a merchant, I think you’d make an excellent squire. But a knight can’t have a squire of the opposite sex. We always used to joke about it in the Academy. That we’d find some cute boy and make him our squire so we could boss him around. But it’s impossible... impossible...”

Her hand goes limp in yours and she slips away into unconsciousness.

\------

You sit there with her for a long time, until it starts to get dark. With nightfall comes the sort of deep chill that can only be felt in the desert after the heat of the day bleeds out into the sky, leaving the landscape so cold that it’s as if the rock has transformed to ice, especially under the light of the recently risen moon. But with your enemies looking for you to light a fire would be tantamount to suicide. 

Leuna shivers even despite the layers of bedding you’ve laid on top of her. You’re worried it might be shock, and so you strip off the outer layers of your own clothing and add them to the pile.

It doesn’t seem to help, and you start to shiver yourself.

Stupid. There’s only one thing you can do.

You slip in beside her under the layers of blankets, on her right side so that you won’t accidentally touch her wound during the night. You squeeze up flush against her, giving her the gift of your own body heat.

After a while he stops shivering and she murmurs and turns her head. 

Her eyes open and she smiles weakly at you. Under the moonlight, her pale face seems like it’s been carved from marble.

“My warm little squire,” she murmurs, then falls back asleep.

You breathe a sigh of relief. So it wasn’t shock, just the cold. 

As you look at her face, you notice a trail of silver slip down one cheek.

A tear.

You turn over, your heart breaking, and it’s a long time until you fall asleep.

\-------

You’re having a nightmare. There’s something else in the cave with you and Leuna. It smells like brimstone, its breath like hot, sour milk in your face. When it moves, it’s the scraping of sandpaper against stone.

It lets out a long, sibilant hiss.

You try to open your eyes, but they’re already open. You didn’t fall asleep at all. It isn’t a nightmare.

Leaning over the two of you is a long wedge-shaped head. Narrow dark eyes glisten deep in gouges on either side of it. You watch, petrified, as it moves its head back and forth, opening its mouth to reveal row upon row of needle-sharp teeth as a forked tongue slips out to taste the air.

A sand-drake. There’s no mistaking it. About the size of a human, it’s related to the dragon: a smaller, dumber, more aggressive relative. You say small, but relative to a dragon everything is small. This drake is about human size.

It turns its head again and licks at Leuna’s face with its tongue. Then it nuzzles the bedding over her wound and starts to hiss.

You don’t hesitate. You take hold of the edge of the blanket that’s on top of all the bedding and you toss it over the creature at the same time as you throw yourself against it. it’s taken by surprise as you knock it clear over, and in its confusion you manage to lock your arms around its scaly neck and pull it over on top of you and away from Leuna. You’re left on your back on the ice-cold stone with the drake on top of you, crushing you, its claws digging at the air as it tries to find traction. You hold onto it for dear life, knowing that if you let go it will most likely bite your face off, or worse attack Leuna as she sleeps. 

“Leuna!” you cry.

The drake starts to thrash around, the sharp spines along its back lacerating your clothes and skin and you cry out in pain. Its neck is too thick to choke it, and so you gouge it in the eyes with your fingers.

It lashes its head back, smashing you in the face and you taste blood. You struggle to hold onto it, blinded with pain, but your arms slip from around its neck and you land on your back on the cave’s stone floor. Then the dull pain in your head is replaced by needles of fire as the drake swings around and clamps its jaws down on your forearm.

You scream in agony.

The needles withdraw and you’re enveloped in the stink of sour milk and brimstone. The drake is leaning over you, its mouth wide. You wait for the inevitable.

There’s a sickening crunch and you expect further searing agony. It doesn’t come. The drake rolls off you, and in your pain-filled confusion you wonder why it would suddenly do that. 

But then you see Leuna. She’s flung the bedding aside and one of her long legs is sticking out. She’s kicked the drake clean off you.

The drake scrambles to regain its footing but Leuna is on top of it in a heartbeat, locking her good arm around its neck and wrapping her legs around its serpentine body like a wrestler. With a twist of her hips she pulls the creature onto its side. The drake thrashes back and forth but Leuna is glued to it, hooking her feet together around its back and squeezing tighter and tighter with her thighs. She grunts and the drake opens its mouth, emitting a strident hiss. There’s a sharp crack and the hiss terminates in a single, strangled shriek. 

Leuna has broken its back.

While it lies there twitching, Leuna grabs the knife lying near you and once, twice, three times she drives the blade straight up into the creature’s thrashing head. 

Shuddering, the drake’s limbs go limp, its tongue lolling from its mouth as a death rattle escapes its gurgling throat.

The entire fight has lasted maybe ten seconds, and you’ve watched it through a misty haze, almost as if you’re drunk. You press your hand against the wound the drake’s teeth made. It feels strange, now. The pain has been replaced by a weird sensation of spreading coldness.

Of course. Venom. Sand-drakes are venomous. It’s the reason they’re teeth are so long and thin. They wait until their prey’s heart stop from it and then dine on them at their leisure.

Leuna has extricated herself from under the dead creature and is at your side now. You see her desperate face in the moonlight flooding into the cave, hear her calling your name from a thousand years and a thousand miles away.

She goes away. Sharp pain in your arm, then warm wetness. Not blood, Leuna’s mouth, sucking the venom from your wound, spitting it to the ground.

You’re rising up. Leuna’s beautiful face, grimacing in pain as she lifts you.

You smell her horse, and her. You’re in her arms, seated in front of her, enveloped by her like when the two of you were escaping the ambush. The world is bounding up and down now like an earthquake. You’re on horseback. You feel hideously cold inside, but around you there is warmth.

The world about looks all white. Has it snowed while you were in the cave, fighting the drake? No, it’s the moonlight. The landscape is drenched in it.

Moonlight. You turn your head. The moon is staring down at you, flooding the world with her pure light. She’s so beautiful, with her hair like pale yellow star-shine whipping about her face in an interstellar wind.

“Hold on!” whispers the moon. She’s dressed all in glowing silver, like an angel. “Hold on! Don’t die on me! Hold on!”

There’s rain falling now. Warm rain on your face and neck.

You ride out across the surface of the moon, over its snowy hills and through its icy ravines and across its fields of frost.

Then all of that goes and you feel yourself slipping away.

You wish you could have seen the moon’s face one more time. Your heart is filled with love for her. But if she can’t be yours, what’s the point in living anyway?

“Don’t go,” says the moon. “Please. Stay with me. Don’t go!”

She doesn’t want you to go. You pull back. It feels so warm here, where you are. It smells so good, too. And that other place is so cold, cold and dark.

You decide to stay here.

But then everything grows darker and darker. Shadows spill over you, a deeper nightfall. You can’t see her face anymore, but the moon’s voice is ringing in your ears.

“Please. Please. Don’t leave me. I love you!”

She loves you. The moon loves you. Your frozen body is filled to overflowing with sadness and happiness all at once. 

But you fall anyway, fall deep down into nightmare dreams of stone and scale and pain and sour milk.


	4. Chapter 4

Something is crushing your hand. You jerk awake in a panic, remembering your desperate fight with the sand-drake.

But you’re no longer in that cold cave of stone. You’re lying on a smooth, cool bed, a sheet draped over you, and someone is calling your name.

It’s Leuna. She’s holding your hand. 

That explains the crushing, then.

It’s your body’s turn to be crushed as Leuna throws her arms around you and hugs you to her. She’s saying something, something fast and incomprehensible between the sobs as she nuzzles her teary face into your neck.

After a while you can make out what she’s saying.

“I thought I’d lost you, I’d thought I lost you,” over and over again.

You hear a cough and over Leuna’s spun-platinum hair you catch sight of a young man dressed in a monk’s habit standing there with a small tray of medicines. He’s trying to hide a smile and failing, but then he shakes his head and his expression becomes professionally stern.

“Now then,” he says, trying to make his voice lower than it is. “Please don’t mistreat the patient, milady. He’s still as weak as a kitten after all the trials his body has undergone.” 

You feel Leuna nod and then she sits back down on the chair beside your bed. Her blue eyes are swollen red and still streaming with tears which she wipes at with the back of one hand.

You notice then that she’s wearing a dress, azure with a deeply cut bodice embroidered with gold. You can’t help but stare at her. It’s the first time you’ve seen her wearing something other than her armour or her tunic and your heart races at just how beautiful she looks. 

The monk makes a tutting sound as he places the tray of medicine on a little table on the other side of the bed.

“Welcome to Hiria,” says the monk. He hands you a vial. “Drink this.”

You do as he says. It tastes vile and you start coughing.

The monk shakes his head. “Of course it tastes terrible. It’s tincture of lycoris root, the only known antidote for the bite of the sand-drake. The freezing element of the venom that brought you to the edge of death needs to be counteracted with heat and bitterness.” He takes the vial from you and gives you another to drink. “You’re extremely lucky. A few more hours without treatment and you would have died. Luckily, your friend rode through the day and night to get you here. You owe her your life.” 

You look across at Leuna. At the monk’s words she’s turned away, blushing, and it’s then that you notice the fresh scar on the side of her face. You lift your hand to it, asking whether the drake did it, but she shakes her head. 

“We ran into a few problems on the way,” she says and explains that some of Lazgarri’s men were waiting for you further down the coastal road.

You gape at her. She risked the coastal road even when she knew it was going to be full of Lazgarri’s men? 

“Of course I did,” she replies, frowning at what she obviously thinks is a ridiculous question. “There was no time. No time to fight them properly, either. I cut down a few and broke through, but one of them got a lucky swing on me.” She lifts her hand to yours. “Don’t make that face. It’s only a scratch.”

Your hand feels suddenly heavy and you take it from her face with great reluctance. You start to feel your eyes closing and you turn in panic to the monk.

He grins at you, breaking his professional sternness. “Don’t worry, it’s just a soporific. You need your sleep. It’s the only way your body will heal itself.”

You turn back then to Leuna. She still has your hand in hers, but she’s holding it more gently now. Her eyes glisten as she looks at you and a single tear falls from one of them. She places your hand by your side, then, and takes hold of your shoulders as you start to sink back onto the bed, the air itself weighing you down with the weight of a mountain range. Struggle as you might, your eyes close. You feel the soft warmth of Leuna’s lips against your own, the gentleness of her fingers as she strokes your hair, and hear her whisper “I love you.” Or are you already dreaming?

Who knows? All you know is that you love her too.

\-------

You wake again. The room is dark, but then a light springs into life nearby, glowing with the buttery yellow of alchemical power. The monk walks past it towards your bed, that accursed tray in his hands again. With the flickering light casting a chiaroscuro on his face, he looks somehow devilish.

As he puts down the tray, you look about you, but there’s no sign of Leuna.

He pulls up the chair that she had used and hands you the vial. You drink it. Somehow, the second time it tastes even worse.

You’re about to ask him where Leuna is when he says, “She’s gone.” There’s a surprising pity in his eyes and you feel your heart sink.

Gone?

“She asked me to give you this.”

He hands you a leather envelope and something that glitters with silver in the alchemical light. You take it and turn it over in your hands.

Her clasp, the one in the shape of the crescent moon. 

“She stayed with you all day and night, you know. A whole week she kept vigil at your bedside before you woke.”

A week?

“The struggle against the venom of the sand drake is no small business,” says the monk. “For a long time we feared we’d lose you to it. When you regained consciousness yesterday, we knew the fight had been won, thank the Lord.” He clasps his hand and raises his eyes to the ceiling then turns back to you. “She wept such tears after you returned to sleep as I’ve never seen before.” He sighs. “I’ve been a monk all my life, so I know nothing of love, and sometimes I’m glad of it.”

The monk stands up. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts,” he says. “But be sure to get some rest. You’re still very weak.” He walks away, but then stops and over his shoulder he adds, “Just remember that old adage. ‘Tis better to have loved...’” He falls silent and leaving the glow of the alchemical torch walks out into the darkness, leaving you alone.

You put the clasp down on the bed and with trembling fingers you open the envelope. There’s a letter inside, written on delicate paper in an exquisite, tiny hand.

_My dearest,_

_I love you. Oh, why is it that I am only able to write those sweet words, only able to utter them when you cannot hear them? Would that I had been strong enough to say them to your face, but I am the basest coward. I feared that my voice would break mid-sentence and the words die half-spoken from my lips._

_Why am I no longer at your side? I have fled from you, wretch that I am, fled from love into the arms of duty. I fear you must forget me, my darling, forget what transpired between us. I was wrong to dally with your heart, full knowing that this time would come, that we would be separated by those cruel walls of the castle, you to go to your life as a merchant and I as a knight of the Regency. And yet, I cannot regret those embraces we shared, those embraces that I will never forget._

_And so take for yourself my clasp, that which before you was the one most precious thing to me in all the world. Now that thing is your name, the sweet name that will pass my lips with sighs and groans as I endure the torments of loneliness, remembering the soft gentleness of your hands, the warmth of your arms and the sweetness of your kisses._

_My heart is yours forever._

_Leuna._

The letter slips from your trembling hand.

Before you met Leuna you would have laughed at such flowery words and overwrought emotion, thinking them ironic, but you know her too well. It’s the only language of romance Leuna knows. Every word of it is true, and it breaks your heart. 

You crush the letter to your chest, clutching her clasp in your other hand. Tears come hot to your eyes and you lie there, cursing fate and wishing that you’d been given the chance to see her one last time, if only to say goodbye.

\---------

When you request to be discharged, the young monk tries to convince you to stay, but with little enthusiasm. The look on his face is knowing, the pity in his eyes unconcealed. You take out the money that Kalbasa left you, seeking to give a donation for your care, but the monk shakes his head.

“The lady has already given one on your behalf,” he says. Your face must have fallen, for the monk places his hand on your shoulder, wanting to say something, but in the end he just smiles at you.

“May God walk with you and protect you,” he says as you leave.

It’s afternoon and you walk out into the busy streets of Hiria. You’re in the inner city, the cobblestone streets between the high marble buildings filled with people. For once you’re happy for the crowds and you disappear among them, anonymous and alone in your sadness. 

You walk the streets aimlessly for hours. The famed street lights have just started bursting into glowing life when you finally decide to make for the merchant quarter to locate the contact your master gave you. And yet you quickly find your feet carrying you away from the port and towards the inner city again. 

Over the aisles of spitting lanterns the dark shape of the Regent’s castle looms before you. You soon reach the nearest gate, wrought in iron and emblazoned with the sunburst of the Regency. A guard is leaning up against the wall, his halberd at his side and his helmet down over his eyes, but if you thought he was sleeping, you’re soon disabused of the fact as one hand slips to the hilt of his weapon and the other pushes his helmet back. He glances at you then sighs and leans back up against the wall.

“It’s past curfew, friend,” he says. “If you’ve business in the castle it’ll have to wait for tomorrow. No need to spend the night in pursuit of gold when there are so much ale and so many eager wenches waiting out there in the sulphur-lit city.”

You tell him that the business you seek is of a personal nature, but beyond that you’ve no idea how you’re supposed to explain yourself. You stand there feeling lost, but you know you have to try.

Your words spark the guard’s interest and he opens his eyes again. “A personal nature? Do you have papers, perhaps?”

You shake your head. 

The guard sighs again. “I take it, then, that you’re not expected.”

You shake your head a second time. The lady, you say, beginning to explain...

At the word ‘lady’ the guard pushes himself up off the wall, looking at you as if seeing you for the first time. A smile spreads onto his face, but there’s more sympathy than mockery in it.

“Who is it?” he asks you. “A maid? One of the ladies-in-waiting?”

A knight, you say.

The guard’s eyes go wide and he whistles. “You have a taste for silver, then, I take it. I guess it shouldn’t be surprising, since you’re a merchant.” He chuckles at his joke. Then he sighs again and leans back up against the wall. “I feel for you, brother. I really do. But take this advice from a fellow who’s been in love before. Try and forget her. See these?” He waves his hands up at the great beetling walls before you. “The walls aren’t just there in case of enemy siege, you know. They’re there to keep the city and the castle apart. You need to have a good reason to pass under them, and even then, they’ll only let you stay there for as long as they need you. Then you’ll be thrown back here with the rest of us great unwashed. Why, all my years as a guard at this gate I’ve only ever been inside the castle proper once.” 

You stand there, knowing the truth of what he says. You stare up at the great dark walls of the castle.

 _Loving hearts divided._ Wasn’t that what Leuna had said that night at the inn? But unlike a romance, there’s no secret door or magic spell or friendly giant to help you.

The guard watches you. “Don’t even think it, brother. I saw a guy try and climb the walls once. He fell halfway up. It wasn’t pretty.” He places the helmet back over his face. “But there _is_ a cure for love, my friend, beyond the embraces of the one you love, I mean...”

And what’s that, you ask.

“Ale.”

\---------

The night is almost done. You’ve lost count of how many drinks you’ve downed in this little inn on the edge of the inner city and you curse the guard’s advice. If anything, the ale has just made your heart more querulous and you sit there in your shaded booth, nursing your tankard and wondering how many more you have to drink to send you into the oblivion of sleep.

The inn is quiet, with few people talking. Everyone seems there to drink and be alone with their thoughts. But all that changes when the front door crashes open and a tall, black-bearded knight bursts through, a young woman dressed in a leather jerkin crushed to his side.

“Ale!” cries the knight. “Ale for a knight of the Regency!”

You look up, hating him immediately, hating him for his noisy interruption, for the silver cuirass that reminds you of Leuna, and for the pretty girl at his side.

Your bad luck continues as the knight seats himself at the booth next to yours. He pulls the girl onto his lap and she squeals, struggling to escape his eager kisses.

“Ale!” cries out the knight again, thumping a first on the table. “Our throats are parched from defending you worthless whoresons out in the northern dales. Ale, I say, for a loyal knight of the Regency and his faithful squire!”

You almost spill your drink. You stare across at the two, wondering if you heard right. The girl has removed herself from the knight’s lap and has draped herself against him, stroking his beard and whispering into his ear.

The smile on the knight’s face drops away as his eyes fall on you. He gets up, leaning over the table.

“What are you looking at, son?”

The girl makes mollifying noises at him as you start to babble an apology. You were just surprised, you say, to hear him call the lady his squire. 

The knight’s eyes harden. “She doesn’t look like a squire to you? Son, she could unman you with her bare hands if she wished it.”

No, it’s not that, you say. It’s just that you’ve heard...

The knight bursts into uproarious laughter, his beard shaking, and the girl joins in as well. “What? Men and women, kept separate? Where do you think you are? This isn’t thrice-accursed Mendia, you know!”

 _This isn’t Mendia_.

You shove your hand into your purse and scatter more than enough coins on the table to pay for your drinks, and then you’re out of your seat and running into the dawn-bright streets.

\-------

_Six months later..._

“...they’re not the worst batch of recruits I’ve ever been lumped with, but they’re also far from the best.”

Recognising the voice of the drill sergeant, you look up from reloading your crossbow and almost take your finger off as the string flies back. There’s laughter from your fellow trainee-squire beside you, but he quickly falls quiet. 

“Hey,” he says, grabbing your arm as you suck on your smarting finger. “Hope you brushed your hair this morning. We’ve got another shopper.”

 _Shopping._ It’s what the trainees call it when a knight comes to look you all over in advance of choosing their own squire. 

You pick up your crossbow, load it and prepare to fire another wild shot at the target. Over the past six months you’ve become a more-than-decent shot, but you always make sure to forget everything you’ve learned whenever a knight is watching you. Because of that you’ve been here longer than everyone else, watching others who started the program after you get chosen by a knight and leave for their new posts throughout the Regency.

It’s earned you a constant stream of abuse from the drill sergeant and some pretty unflattering nicknames among the other trainees, but none of it has dampened your enthusiasm for your training. You fall asleep with her name on your lips, and its the first thing on your lips when you awake.

Leuna. That beautiful name.

You lift the crossbow’s sight to your eye and left your hand lazily list to the right, ensuring the shot will miss the target completely. But then you feel someone come up behind you and rest their hand on yours, drawing the crossbow back to the left.

It’s a soft, warm hand, and the person it belongs to leans close to your ear and says, “Here. Let me help you.”

As you move the target back into your sights you suddenly recognise the scent of the person behind you and your hand starts to shake. The crossbow goes off, the quarrel whizzing across the field to miss the target and bury itself in the grassy slope behind it.

Behind you, the drill sergeant snorts, half from anger and half from amusement. It’s a sound you’ve some to know well. 

“Premature ejaculation every single time,” he mutters. “You see what I have to work with?”

But you barely hear him. The crossbow slips from your hands as you turn to look into the blue-on-blue eyes of the one you love.

Leuna.

Her hair’s a little longer, tied back in a small ponytail, the scar she received at the hands of Lazgarri’s men now just a pale line. But there’s no change in the bright smile on her face, nor the way she starts to blush as you stare at her, barely believing it’s her. 

“I don’t think I have to look at anyone else,” Leuna says to the drill sergeant behind her. “I’ve made up my mind.”

“ _This_ one?” His voice is thick with disbelief. “You must be joking. He couldn’t fight his way out of a tightly-buttoned doublet. The only thing he’s any good at is bandaging and healing.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” says Leuna, your hand still in hers as her eyes begin to glisten. “These pretty hands look like they’re good at a lot more than that.”

The End.


End file.
